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Seven Spindles and a McGuffin was named one of the 24 winners of the One Page Dungeon Contest 2012. I appreciate the honor, even more so than last year, because my entry this year wasn’t as good and the competition really kicked up a notch. Thank goodness they named more winners this time around!

At the time of this post, the main site for the contest seems to have fallen down, but there is a PDF containing all the winners on a different site. (And this guy reviewed them all, mentioning this entry as “bereft of flavor or charm”. Hoo-rah!) Once the site comes back up, though, check out all of the entries (over a hundred, I think). People really brought it this year.

In honor of this win, I’m releasing the source files for this dungeon (under the same CC licence as the PDF). This zip file contains one Adobe Illustrator file with the dungeon map and one InDesign file that links to the map and contains the text and other stuff. If you use these sources for something, drop me a link to the results in the comments.

In honor of the successful completion of the MFØ kickstarter, I’m volunteering to produce (and publicly post) seven LDraw files of mobile frames, with companion PDFs of assembly instructions. If you have a frame you’d like to see get this treatment, post it to the thread built for the purpose on the Mobile Frame Hangar forum. First come, first served and some restrictions apply.

Faster, Better, Cheaper – potentially useful title; thread about a game which seems cool, but didn’t jibe with what I was planning.

Gnost]A game of . . . uh, White Wolf revision?(tangled mess) – I took two “ingredients” away from this: “tangled mess” and “Can’t Finish What You Started”. I may have used the former. I definitely used the latter in the whole “build something without any indication on how to use it” structure of the game.

In any case, the “Last Chance” theme is what really triggered the design of the game. It immediately said to me “make a game with materials that get destroyed as you use them”. This then clicked with a thought I had when Thomas Kinkade died about using his images for a game.

I seriously doubt anyone will ever actually play this game, including me; however, as mentioned in the rules, post your final images here if you do.

I had some some goals for the design of this dungeon (and some observations after building it):

Must use a vector-based map. (Why? Well, note that this map is infinitely scalable, but the whole PDF is under 300KB.)

Wanted a dungeon with a couple totally different vectors of entry.

Provide the flow control usually supplied by different levels of a dungeon, all using a single map. The center spindle effectively allows this to be a six level dungeon on half a page.

Take a regional approach, where the dungeon is described by section rather that detailing each room.

Put some rooms at angles to the grid, but showing the grid in their own frame of reference.

Subvert the idea of dungeon as node graph idea from last year’s entry. It may be possible to node graph this dungeon, but I’m not entirely sure how to do it, especially since the small spindles are placed at random each time the dungeon is run.

Minimize hallways (if you were digging your own underground complex, you don’t get much return out of the labor). Some sections do this better than others.

Because each of the spindles serves eight potential openings, it turns out to be critical that the spindles turn in 45° increments. If they turned in 90° increments, I’m pretty sure that you can get situations where randomly placing the spindles results in unreachable rooms. Turning at 45° increments avoids this, though you might get cases where some rooms can only be reached if you stay in the spindle when it rotates.

Use psychology against the delvers. For example, in a couple of places, there are short hallways with a normal door on one end and a secret door on the other. The normal door is in the “more secret” area, so the idea is that if the delvers are already in the secret area and go through the normal door, when they find the (obvious) secret door at the other end, their tendency will be to go through it (“it’s secret, it must be protecting something good”), which actually leads them out of the secret area. Not sure if it would shake out like that in play, but that’s the idea.

Loved the idea of the spindles periodically sealing and unsealing sections, so that air, water and such rush in or out when the spindle moves. Like, if you are in a room with water up to your ankles and, meanwhile, the tide has risen outside, then the spindle turns and the high tide rushes into the room you’re in. Probably should have done more with that notion, but it is a) tough to do in one page and b) hard to explain and use.

The overlapping technique used in the fissure section, where one room is on top of another with a ladder between them, could have been used more. I thought it might confuse people, even though it is a bit easier to illustrate with the rooms at angles to each other.

I think last year’s entry was stronger, but when I went to the well this time, this is what came out.

Also, if you have a lot of cash, seriously consider one of the high level awards. Soren Roberts is an extremely talented LEGO designer and the rewards for his original work are rare offers.

Thanks in large part to prior posts here about Mechaton and LDraw, I’ve been asked to render the assembly instructions for the mechs in this product. Hopefully I can post some LDraw models when the product is published.

Since Dicenomicon, my preferred dice roller for iOS allows for the creation and (cumbersome) sharing of custom dice definitions, I threw together a definition for a d12 that can be used for FATE games. Odds are the same as standard FUDGE dice (equal chances of “&plus;”, “−” or ” “). They look like this:

How to use this file is not explained that well in the app and not that obvious. And way harder than it should be. I’d love to say “go to the obvious screen in Dicenomicon and type in this URL to download it”, but I can’t, because that inexplicably isn’t an option. There are supposed to be several ways to get the file there, but most of them don’t work (the “import from documents” route fails with a “stream had too few bytes” error).

Download the definition file.

On your iOS device, launch Dicenomoicon and hit the info button in the top right.

Tap “Sharing”.

Tap “Web-based Editor”.

You are about to turn your device into a web server, briefly. Make up a username and password and tap “Start Server”.

At the bottom of the screen, your device will display a URL to use. Open a browser on your computer (assuming it is on the same network as the iOS device) and go to that URL. When asked for a username and password, enter the one you just made up.

One year has passed since the third lark was awarded to help produce Sage LaTorra‘s game Powers For Good. According to Sage’s progress notes on the game, the iOS application he pledged to create is awaiting AppStore approval. This will make his release a couple days late but, since he also produced the totally excellent Dungeon World while making this game, I think we can cut him a little slack.

You may have noticed I’m not running a similar “$1,000 for an indie game” concept this year. This is mostly because I don’t have the bandwidth to deal with running it this year, but also partly for other reasons. Since the first lark, Kickstarter has grown popular for managing the risk of an indie game launch, and it may be a better fit for bringing quality games to market than contests like this one. I have made a point of funding nearly any rpg-related Kickstarter I find. I have to check to see if I’ve spent $1,000 on Kickstarters yet, but it seems like it might be a better use of the cash. Still thinking about it though.

I thought it might be interesting to see what became of some of the other ideas pitched a year ago. Some of these were already close to completion at the time. If you pitched last year, and I get the current details wrong or couldn’t find information about the game you picthed, post a comment to correct me. In the order they were pitched:

A working copy of The Detective Heroes Gods Role Playing Game was offered for free by its author.

Christian Griffen’s Anima Prime seems tailor made for hacking to tell stories in the Exalted setting. I’ve been playing with hacking the system to do so. The results are untested, but go by the unimaginative name of Exalted Prime on the unofficial wiki.

Chris Perrin’s role-playing game Mecha does a great job of allowing stories about pilots of giant humanoid warmachines to be strongly driven by character, instead of number crunching. Though mecha anime acts as the source inspiration for Mecha, I want to use the same rule set to bring more character driven play to the universe of BattleTech, particularly during the Fourth Succession War.

Thoughts on doing this are still in the experimental stage, but have progressed far enough to share and, importantly, get feedback. If you have ever played Mecha or BattleTech (or, better yet, both), let me know what you think either in a comment here, or on this Story Games thread.

You can read the progress of this project in the following Google doc: Succession